


Lineaments

by CuriousMeans



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Just a minor subtraction of ass and major addition of OFC., Yes it shall be one of those fan fics.
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-28
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:48:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23223523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CuriousMeans/pseuds/CuriousMeans
Summary: In 1989, eight years after the worst night of his life and well into his teaching career, Severus Snape wandered in Harrowing Acquisitions in Diagon Alley in search of a rare text and left with the text and a scowl.Somehow, despite the frequency of the expression, this one didn't stick, and that small change sowed several others.
Relationships: Severus Snape/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	1. Acquisition (I)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm writing this for two reasons: to make Snape a slightly better teacher through social interaction and to be utterly self-indulgent in my writing during self isolation. This might never be completed, but I promise to pick away at it over the course of the next few weeks.
> 
> Additionally, I'm going to be making some things up to fit this story. It's an AU but only vaguely. For example, there will be a Tangent Alley in this story; consider it a metaphor for this story's focus.

_ Diagon Alley. August 1989. _

It was far too early for students to be crowding Diagon Alley and yet here they were, sweaty and screaming, scrabbling from one store to the other with sticky hands and smearing their disgusting paws across Severus Snape’s robes as he shoved his way down the street. Several squeaked and stumbled back the moment he turned his gaze on them. A few ran all the way back to their parents. Older siblings snatched younger ones from his path and whispered warnings.

Finally, his teaching career had come to fruition.

“Don’t look him in the eyes,” a child - Merlin, was that what fifteen-year-olds looked like now? so small? so unsure? - “Remember that Hufflepuff first year that went missing?”

No first years had gone missing in the last decade. Probably. Severus rarely concerned himself with the goings-on of other houses unless he could deduct points, and he could hardly do that to a student no one could find.

“No,” the younger kid said.

Their sibling hustled them away. “Exactly.”

Severus snorted, drawing his robe more tightly around himself despite the autumn warmth, and plunged deeper down Diagon Alley. The shops grew less vital the farther from the Leaky Cauldron. There were no ice cream parlors full of sloppy children or common bookshops stuffed to the brim with out of order books he had read by thirteen. He slipped down Tangent Alley, a sliver of a street that formed a thin half-circle and connected two ends of Diagon Alley. A few dim side streets no longer than a storefront connected the outer edge to Knockturn Alley. 

It was still slightly too close to his old path and bitter friends, but some things were worth the danger.

He rarely journeyed here, or to any public places anymore, and chose instead to order his ingredients books from the same suppliers he had been using for years; however, there had been whispers in the potion’s world that someone with sense had removed the curse preventing reading from an old copy of Pedanius Dioscorides’s sixth and seventh volumes from  _ De Materia Medica _ . Severus had only ever seen them mentioned in indexes and footnotes.

“Harrowing Acquisitions,” he muttered to himself, upper lip pulled back. “Trite.”

The storefront was only wide enough for a narrow door and window. A manuscript with no cover and worn vellum pages illustrated in writhing red ink rested on a dark purple pillow, two ceramic tea cups of pale green sprouted oleander that bloomed and withered back into the bottoms, and several Sumerian bullae were on display. Severus pushed open the door and sighed when no bell rang. Instead, he straightened slightly at the teeth-shivering sensation of an alarm spell sensing his presence. The cloying scents of ink and old paper filled his nose.

“Good morning,” said the girl at the counter, not even glancing up at him.

Annoyance already aching behind his eyes, Severus said nothing. He swept across the small store in five strides and found no tomes or translations even related to  _ De Materia Medica.  _ The small front room contained only a single bookshelf that housed texts from the 1400s to today and covered everything from animagi to capnomancy. He paced back across the room and scanned the store again. A door behind the inattentive girl must have led to a storeroom. 

She turned the page of her book and marked it with a thin red ribbon. "Are you looking for something specific?"

“Obviously.” Severus resisted the urge to roll his eyes - an unfortunate habit he had picked up somehow from his students - and stepped up to the counter. He corrected his posture ever so slightly and let himself loom over her. He was well aware of what he looked liked, billowing robes, black eyes, sneer, and all. It was only fair he use the face he had been cursed with to his advantage.

The girl hesitated for a moment, long fingers pulling the ribbon from her book, and carried on reading. Severus took a shallow breath and took one last look around. On the counter near her elbow was a thin flyer in glittering purple ink.

“If interested in volumes six and seven of the  _ De Materia Medica _ ,” it read, “please discuss with C. Harrow directly.”

Severus tapped the flyer. “Is this available for translation?” he asked.

The girl pointed to the sign on the wall behind her head. It was identical to the one he had read outside.

**Harrowing Acquisitions**

acquisition ◐ identification ◑ translation

“Obviously,” she said.

“Enough,” he said. Her presence and the very strain of existing had wedged themselves like an icepick behind his eyes. “Where is the proprietor? Harrow?”

She finally looked up, though she did not meet his eyes.

“I am Cecilia Harrow, the only Harrow in England and the proprietor of this shop,” she said and laid the ribbon across her page. “If you know of another, you are welcome to ask them for assistance, though I doubt they will be particularly helpful considering the copies are in my possession and not for sale.”

Severus narrowed his eyes at her. She couldn’t have been older than twenty, yet he could not recall having ever taught or attended school with a Harrow. Her name was far more recognizable than her face. Dark brown eyes were set above a small, narrow nose and then hidden behind a large pair of circular golden glasses. Her white skin, like his, was pale, but unlike his had a healthy warm undertone. A braid of rich auburn hair was tossed over her shoulder, a few stray strands framing her oval face. 

No, he could not place her at all. Curious.

“How much for a translation?” He sneered. “No references required. I am familiar with the terminology and systems of the time.”

One did not become a potions master without understanding the nuances of foundational texts.

“Ten thousand per volume,” she said and slid from her stool. She couldn’t have been more than five foot four and utterly unassertive looking. “The translation will still require some localisation to make it coherent, and the payment covers my time and expenses.”

That price would not ruin him considering his salary and the little else he spent it on, but it was indulgent in a way that made his stomach turn. But how often did one get to read such tomes? Perhaps Dumbledore could be persuaded that it was a necessary translation for the school library.

“Absolutely not,” said Severus, removing his hands from the counter as if he were ready to leave. “I am asking for a translation, not ownership of the books themselves.”

“You are, potentially, acquiring the first ever translation for a fundamental medical text from 78 AD.” She closed the book - manners were truly slipping through the fingers of society with each passing year - and met his gaze. “Frankly, I have been providing inquiring minds with time to observe the text and access to translations of specific sections. These texts belong in a museum or St Mungo’s.”

“Except I am not simply an inquiring mind and you haven’t gifted them to any such places yet for safe keeping,” Severus said, staring down his nose at her with all the fury he typically reserved for know-it-all Ravenclaws who required taking down a peg or two hundred. “I am one of the premier potioneers in England, if not the world, and the current Potions Master of Hogwarts. You are someone with no name recognition in a store that appears to have been set up yesterday. If the volumes are authentic and the translation passable, then I will pay five thousand each.”

“My name is quite recognizable given I am the only one here, and the store was opened last week,” she said, spinning a thin golden band on her first finger. “The volumes were authenticated. You are welcome to peruse them and attempt translations yourself for one thousand.”

He arched one brow. “That is hardly worth one sickle.”

“So your translation would be substandard?”

He scowled.

“I attended Beauxbatons and am quite unfamiliar with you,” she said after a beat, “but if you do require proof of my abilities, you are more than welcome to contact the school. Otherwise, I require ten thousand galleons per volume to begin working. Several of the illustrations are quite cursed.”

Now that was interesting.

“Original curses?” he asked, headache waning.

“Unclear as of yet,” said Ms. Harrow. Her eyes narrowed. “Are you interested in observing the curses? They will have to be removed prior to translation and documented for history’s sake.”

“Perhaps.” He laid one hand back on the counter. “Why not sell them to a private collector? You may collect your ten thousand and the tomes may collect dust.”

“I hardly think anyone willing to pay that much would fail to provide secure and clean containment,” she said quickly and drew a rather stiff walnut wand from her robes. She paused midway through a spell. “That was not sincere.”

He didn’t even grace that with a response.

She scowled - the first expression to cross her face - and cast a charm he didn’t recognize under her breath. “Do you wish to deal with me or not?”

He most decidedly did not.

“I want to see the curses before they are removed and then I wish to purchase a translation in English,” said Severus. “However, your notes on the translation and the tomes are kept by you for five years. What is the point in purchasing these notes if everyone else can purchase them as well?”

Ms. Harrow's head titled slightly to the side and her glasses caught the light. “I place the originals and my notes in the store’s vault and in three years I turn it over to the museum for study and display for nine thousand galleons. You may observe the curses and witness me removing them should you be able to stomach the work. I will not be held accountable for any injuries you gain during the course of the curse-breaking.”

His! His alone for three years to study. Finally he would have something to do that wasn’t grading endless essays or brewing pepper-up potions. Merlin, he could feel his mind rotting last year. This would be a balm.

“Deal,” he said. “I will have half of the money transferred to the store’s account before the end of the day.”

He wrote to Beauxbatons that evening, if not to prove to himself she was skilled, then to prove to her he didn’t trust her abilities at all. It was only fair for eight thousand.


	2. Acquisition (II)

_ Diagon Alley. August 1989. _

Three days later at the very moment Cecilia’s clock snapped to noon, Severus Snape stepped through the door to her store. She had felt he was one to respect punctuality and was glad she had been proven correct. Their last meeting had left her with an odd unease prickling along the back of her neck, as if he were furious at her and waiting to strike, but it had taken a note from her old ancient runes professor to settle her. Severus Snape wasn’t angry at her; he was sarcastic and petty. That she could deal with, especially now that she knew what to look for. Faux sincerity was so much harder to deal with.

“I assume you have experience with curses?” she asked by way of greeting.

“Yes,” he said, lips curling.

“Good. Unless you ask, I won’t explain what I’m doing then. I prefer silence while I work.” She lifted a gate in the counter and gestured for him to follow her. “Can you read Greek?”

Mr. Snape nodded. He followed her, thin enough to step through the opening without turning, and glanced behind the counter. She knew the storefront wasn’t particularly interesting to most people, and she wasn’t inclined to cater to the people that required proof of her acquisitions. It was illogical and bothersome. She acquired rare books and objects for translation and curse-breaking before selling them. The sign of a successful store was an empty one.

“I take it business is slow?” Mr. Snape asked.

Cecilia opened the door to her backroom. “No more than expected. I planned on less business before I moved here, and I am still within my predicted numbers. Please - do not touch anything.”

He reminded her of a spider - spindly and lurking, touching everything with the threads of his web and aware of all that went on in his domain. He couldn’t have been older than thirty or so, but there was a ghostly pallor to his face that reminded her of spider silk against the mottled night sky. So pale he might not have been there at all.

Cecilia’s mother, in one of her more polite moods, would have called him striking with his dark eyes, ink-spill hair, and black clothes. Cecilia was simply glad for the aesthetic. She was terrible at linking faces to names.

“Of course,” he muttered.

“Thank you,” she said. He was a teacher; she should have known he would understand.

Mr. Snape had to stoop to follow her through the door. Cecilia let her fingers brush the runes along the frame, the magic in them slipping over her like a gentle rain. The lights in the room flickered to life, flames reflected and magnified by mirrored lanterns, and she stopped at a table in the middle. Her most valuable objects were in Gringotts, but the ones she suspected they wanted she kept with here. The safe in the floor opened to her alone.

She had cleared the room for this. She had worked often with others in France, though sharing her space disturbed her. This room, so sparse save for the crowded shelves lining all four walls, had taken a full week to organize and spell. She knelt and drew her own rune across the top of her safe. So few paid attention to magic when it wasn’t performed with a wand.

“A safe?” Mr. Snape said and snorted. “That seems hardly safe enough.”

Cecilia laughed softly and frowned when he didn’t. The man made no sense.

“Preservation spells were not as effective then as they are now,” he said, circling around her as if she and the safe were wayward prey. “These texts are steeped in magic and age, and they demand - “

“ - a far more delicate touch than the spells you are thinking of, surely,” said Cecilia. “Would you take kindly to me telling you how to preserve the potions you create at Hogwarts? The magic in these texts and the methods intended to preserve them have only degraded as the years passed, not to mention the Muggle preservation methods they have been subjected to.”

He hummed and crossed his arms, the scowl far more at home on his face than he was deferring to her.

Cecilia reached into the safe, arm vanishing far deeper below the floor than would have been possible without magic, and gripped the handle to the second box holding the texts in perfect suspension. No magic, no time, no atmosphere - they were perfectly protected.

She forgot, sometimes, what it was like to have magic and money.

“Like throwing money out the window,” her mother had whispered when her father insisted on sending her to school. Cecilia had displayed no accidental magic as a child. She had barely even spoken. Her wand even picking her had come as quite the surprise.

Her aspirations, along with her, had been all wrong, too, and she had not seen her parents since leaving Beauxbatons. They had expected her to adapt poorly to working life. To be fair, she did adapt poorly, but she was far too determined to let a few breakdowns get in her way.

And it helped that within two years she had tracked down a terribly cursed selection of  _ Itinerarium.  _ Franciscans and their works had been rather unpopular with the magic community. The curse had been a thing of beauty, but time had worn down some of the more dastardly spellwork. People rarely accounted for their own mortality in their spellwork.

“Once I remove the texts from this box,” Cecilia said, setting the smaller box on her work table before them, “they will again be subject to the detriments of time and the curses placed upon them. Please refrain from damaging them.”

“I shall cease breathing then,” he said.

“Unnecessary,” said Cecilia. “I have masks for us to wear.”

She passed one to him with - after drifting in and out of Muggle institutions hunting down her tickets to opening a shop, magic was a necessity when dealing with objects that demanded sterility, and she had not idea how Muggles could deal with such requirements when they had to touch everything - and pulled her own over her mouth and nose. Mr. Snape let his dangle in the air before him.

“A bubblehead charm would suffice,” he said.

She sniffed. “It would not. Magic, over time, grows unstable if not refreshed. Potions expire, do they not? These texts were in Muggle hands for centuries. It’s frankly a miracle that dozens aren’t dead and the texts not a pile of ash. It is better to approach this without magic until we know fully what we are working with. Additional spells could have an adverse effect on the magic already in the pages and ink.”

"Obviously," Mr. Snape muttered, placing the mask on his face.

“If it were, you wouldn’t have spoken.”

Even behind the mask, she could see how deeply he frowned. It wasn’t that Cecilia wasn’t used to sarcasm - she was well acquainted with it - but that did not endear her to it. It was a deep waste of brainpower and time, especially since every word Severus Snape uttered seemed to be sarcastic. The only two logical paths were to treat everything he said as utterly serious or utterly ridiculous.

He said nothing else, but his black eyes bore into her as she opened the box.

Her path, she decided, would depend on how deep the wrinkle between his brows was, and now it was bottomless.

“The first volume,” said Cecilia, setting it atop the table. The runes carved into the wood would preserve the pages and ink for now, and Cecilia pulled a thin piece of tissue paper reinforced with the same runes from the cover of the tome. “The cover - calf, you see - was cursed to hold the person who opened it with the intention of reading the book.”

“How unimaginative,” he muttered, leaning over the table with a soft intake of breath. “A favorite of that time period, was it not?”

“Yes.” Cecilia smiled. Perhaps his demands wouldn’t be the trial she feared. “How familiar are you with the curses, Mr. Snape?”

“Very,” he said through clenched teeth. “If you must, you may call me ‘Severus.’”

If she must? Cecilia nodded slightly and gestured to the first page. It was poorly conserved, the centuries of wear and tear overpowering the spells that had been first laid into it when it was made. At the time, some very exciting advances had just been made in the development of spelled ink.

“He used two types of ink,” said Cecilia. “The first was spelled for preservation and Muggle-repulsion, and the second was cursed. I imagine he discovered the proper curse midway through his writing. It was slightly less sophisticated than curses that later emerged in popular tomes.”

“The older ones are. Curses, particularly, are temperamental and not recorded until tested,” said Severus. “To use it, he must have feared someone else interfering with or stealing his work.”

“These two volumes were stolen shortly after they were finished,” Cecilia said.

“And so potion development was set back dozens of years,” muttered Severus. “How did you get these before the Gringott’s Curse-Breakers?”

“I found them first,” she said, and when he sneered at her, she shrugged. Perhaps he was angry at her. Perhaps he would have preferred dealing with the goblins. It hardly mattered. “I peruse Muggle auction houses of course, but there were several rather old runes keeping the texts disguised. The covers prevented the curses and spells within the books to be detected. To any other witch, these would have appeared to be entirely Muggle works. I only recognized them because of the writing style. They’re in Pedanius’s hand.”

“Gringott’s is particularly vicious when hunting treasures,” said Snape. “Surely your penchant for auctions didn’t let you find these first.”

“My acquisitions are much less adventurous and usually far less impressive.” She turned the first page, and the slippery presence of a curse - one meant to ensnare and attract eyes toward a specific word - slid over her hands. Severus stiffened, and she continued in the same calm tone. She was quite good friends with doubt. “These were written by Pedanius Dioscorides himself. They are not copies like so many of the other volumes in Latin and Arabic. Handwriting is identifiable if you read it often enough, and even forgeries reveal their authors eventually.”

Cecilia found writing meditative and far more informative than divination. People were complicated and reticent, speaking in half-truths and white lies; their handwriting lacked such subterfuge. It was far easier to decipher a text or letter than the tone of a person’s voice. Connotations could always be researched. A smirk could not.

“Forgeries are more often magic - “

“- and more often easily detected then,” said Cecilia quickly. “All magic leaves a trace. Muggle forgeries, though easily identified with magic, require far more technical skill. Either way, these are genuine. The curses being favorites from the time support that if you have any lingering doubts.”

And Severus Snape, despite his deepening scowl said nothing, which she could only assume meant there was no sarcastic quip that wouldn’t give his pleasure at having acquired these texts away.

“Now,” she said, “have you ever broken a curse like this one? They were common but have fallen out of fashion, and I wonder…”


End file.
